his friend, old Mr. Otway. A fever of some kind. He's all right
again, I believe."

"We have heard nothing of it. There's your whistle. Good-bye!"

Jacks leapt into his train, waved a hand from the window, and was
whirled away.

For the rest of her journey, Irene seemed occupied with an
alternation of grave and amusing thoughts. At moments she looked
seriously troubled. This passed, and the arrival found her bright as
ever; the pink of modern maidenhood, fancy free.

The relatives she was visiting were two elderly ladies, cousins of
her mother; representatives of a family native to this locality for
hundreds of years. One of the two had been married, but husband and
child were long since dead; the other, devoted to sisterly
affection, had shared in the brief happiness of the wife and
remained the solace of the widow's latter years. They were in
circumstances of simple security, living as honoured gentlewomen,
without display as without embarrassment; fulfiling cheerfully the
natural duties of their position, but seeking no influence beyond
the homely limits; their life a humanising example, a centre of
charity and peace. The house they dwelt in came to them from their
yeoman ancestors of long ago; it was held on a lease of one thousand
years from near the end of the sixteenth century, "at a quit-rent of
one shilling," and certain pieces of furniture still in use were
contemporary with the beginning of the tenure. No corner of England
more safely rural; beyond sound of railway whistle, bosomed in great
old elms, amid wide meadows and generous tillage; sloping westward